Sir Edmund Hillary: An Appreciation

When trekking up the Dudh Kosi River in Nepal about 30 years ago, our party came across fellow Westerners who told of a rather unusual encounter.

They had come across a tall, quiet man with big bushy eyebrows, speaking with what sounded like an Australian accent, and showing a precise knowledge of directions in the Khumbu region below Mount Everest.

Our guide broke the news: They had just encountered Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two climbers — Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay was the other — to reach the 29,035-foot “roof of the world.”

More than 3,000 people have summited Everest, or Sagarmatha as it is known locally, since that May day in 1953. The climb came just in time for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Hillary, 88, died yesterday in his native New Zealand. He was, simply put, a great old boy.

I interviewed him over breakfast in San Francisco about five years ago, after an American Himalayan Foundation dinner marking the 50th anniversary of the mountain’s first ascent.

Unlike many celebrities – and a fair number of celebrity climbers – Hillary gave back. He was deeply interested in peoples of villages below Everest, and founded a charity called The Himalayan Trust to help them.

The Trust built hospitals and health clinics for the Sherpas, whose permanent homes are villages two vertical miles above sea level. Above all, it built schools — 30 of them — training the Sherpas who have guided thousands to the base (and summit) of such peaks as Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Ama Dablam, and Pumori.

The Trust also campaigned successfully to create Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park, to protect and begin reforestation in valleys below the 20,000-foot-plus peaks.

Hillary paid a personal price. In 1975, his wife Louise and daughter Belinda were killed in a plane crash in the Khumbu.

The mountaineering legends of the 1950′s involve not only first ascents, but dramatic rescues and self-sacrifice.

Hillary became a vocal critic of the summit-at-all-cost philosophy of later climbers, some of whom pay guides as much as $60,000 to climb the world’s highest peak. He erupted in a New Zealand newspaper in 2006 after an estimate 40 climbers passed a dying British mountaineer without attempting a rescue.

“People just want to get to the top,” he said. “They don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress.”

After a few years as a widower, Hillary took up with the widow of a fellow climber. The pair were not yet married in 1984 when the famed climber was named New Zealand’s High Commissioner (ambassador) to India. A special title was created for the lady who sometime later became June Hillary.

Hillary was selective in his commercialism. He did do a Rolex watch ad with famed Tyrolian climber Reinhold Messner, who was the first person to climb Everest without oxygen. Profits went to The Himalayan Trust.